Coffee
by Ecatar
Summary: Kurosaki Ichigo meets Kuchiki Rukia outside a coffee shop at an ice box full of treats for kids in a humid Japanese summer. Series of One-shots, including "Parade," "In-Between Times," "Strawberry Gone," In-Between Times," and "Rubber Pant Pockets." AU. Ichiruki.
1. Chapter 1

**Coffee**

Humid Karakura days.

Ichigo saw coffee steam come out of the streets from the sidewalk, and little jets of sweat fly off hands wiping foreheads.

He tried to imagine drinking coffee in weather like this. It was impossible; all he could feel on his tongue was asphalt.

He wished it was cold, the Karakura snow days. He wore big jackets with fur around the neck, and black gloves. The warm heartbeat of a coffee cup on his hands was unmatched.

And again, rather oddly, his teeth never felt cleaner.

But it wasn't winter in Karakura. It was summer, and asphalt coffee streams were the closest he'd get to his dream.

For today, he was booked to write a paper at a nearby café. Literature major days. The walk there was usually a short one, but today, the muscles underneath his shirt were burning up. Walking itself didn't feel too uncomfortable, though the bottom of his feet reminded him of his mother's simmering stove top meals. Simply being outside was a pain.

Imagining snow and hot coffee in that kind of humidity made breathing a little short.

People told Ichigo that he was always brooding, and that sometimes in public he moved like a marble statue if he was thinking too much. He ran into a man who seemed a lot bigger than he actually was. His body was like cold surface of a cave, and he was rather skinny. He wasn't sweating at all.

He also had a very odd set of tubes that separated parts of his hair into neat joints.

He wasn't wide, nor particularly muscular, but his eyes screamed commands out. He didn't look into you, or through you; he looked beyond you.

Ichigo hadn't realized that his laptop was a cracked open egg, cooking on the ground until the man was gone. He wondered if it was running into him, or seeing those eyes.

Either way, the paper was out of the question now, and he was on his way back home.

He could have called another friend, Inoue or Sado, and worked at their apartments. Sado's apartment probably would have been hotter than it was outside, but it would have been quiet. And afterwards, they could have gone out for some drinks to end the day. Inoue's apartment was probably a lot like frozen ice cream, with red and green sprinkle wallpaper to make her summer feel like Christmas. They could watch a movie on her over sized TV.

But Ichigo found himself down the stairs and out the door.

The sun hadn't faded at all, and he'd worn a sweater out. It didn't really make sense, especially the people who walked by giving him looks.

But all he could think about was the ice box outside the café, with chocolate ice cream bars and sweets that his mom bought him when he was a kid. He didn't have much of a sweet tooth anymore, but he enjoyed the cold air that stayed in the box no matter how long it was left open.

If he chose to forget for a few minutes that the box was powered by circuitry, he could cool his hands off in another world, where "cold," never seemed to end. He could feel the pinch before gathering snow for a snowball on his sweaty hands.

It wasn't the winter coffee he wanted, and maybe it wasn't even as good as the air conditioner and ironic winter decorations at Inoue's or the cold beer at Sado's, but he felt like getting his hands cold.

He wasn't tugged at by the webs of the universe to some great cause; he just wanted to go to that box.

When he got close to the café, he padded the red skin on his neck with both hands. Better to lather them up; it felt colder that way.

He expected some kids to be peering into the box, eyeing the favorite treats they couldn't afford. He'd planned to pay for those kids, and then open up the portal for himself.

Instead, he found a short woman, so short she felt like half his size, straight out of an ice storm horror. She had on a white jacket one size too big, long black boots that caught up to her knees, and a yellow scarf. On her hands she had leather gloves that shined like expensive car seats, and on her head was a black, knit beanie. Her hair wasn't very long, but it wasn't quite short either. It was a saturated black.

He got about halfway to the box, which she looked into with real purpose, before he'd decided that he'd be better off just waiting inside.

"Hey, are you buying an ice cream? I don't mean to get in your way."

"No, actually, I guess I'm not here to buy one at all. I just like how cold the box is."

That was a weird thing to admit to someone he didn't know.

"So you think it's hot outside too, huh? It seems like I'm the only one who thinks it's too cold."

"You mean you're not dying under that jacket?"

"Well why would I be stupid enough to wear this if it made me sweat? Hmm? I'm freezing."

"Yea, I guess you're right. Anyway, I'll just be here a few minutes, I won't bother you."

The air inside the box was just as cold as always, and Ichigo's finger tips started to go numb. He hadn't been seeking a respite from the sun, not at all, but he felt relieved that the box was the same as it always was. It made him feel the same.

He was happy, too, that the woman behind him hadn't stood in his way. Now, it was like she wasn't there at all.

"Now I've never seen anybody do that. You're not going to buy anything, really?"

He could feel the sleeve of her jacket up against his arm now, while she examined his hands, and their relationship with the box. She was really cold.

"No, I just like the cold air inside the box."

"So you stand here with the box open for a while and don't buy anything? Isn't that stealing?"

Embarrassing.

"I guess you're right. I'll buy some of this after I'm done."

He'd never bought himself the sweets.

"So, if you're so cold in a place like this, you must be from some place way up north, right?"

"No, I live on the other side of town. I'm actually supposed to be meeting my brother for coffee today, but he hasn't shown up."

He was looking for sweets his sisters would like the most. His dad, too.

"Well how long has it been since the agreed meeting time?"

"A few hours, I guess. You know I was gonna come early this morning, but I…"

"You what?"

"I went to the wrong café, ha. I waited at the wrong one for five hours! I thought I got lucky when I noticed in time to get here, but, I guess not."

The woman in front of him was laughing, but Ichigo remembered the time his mother asked him to clean up his room before his family came over. He put it off for two days, and on the third day, when he was riding his bike home, he remembered.

When he got in the door, his mom had given him a big hug and kissed him on the head before going back to conversation, and he thought she hadn't noticed yet. He remembered running to his room, and opening the door. Everything was clean, spotless in fact.

He didn't leave his room until the next morning.

"He probably had a good reason for not coming."

"Of course he did! He's not some weirdo who sticks his hands in ice boxes all day! He's a detective for the police!"

She gave him a hard elbow, but she smiled. Her eyes looked like they were watching far beyond the stars, straight into the black behind the sky.

"Oh, a big shot huh? Well, what's his name?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

"Mmm, you know what, not really. I was just making conversation."

Another elbow, though it was far less bony elbow and more padded jacket this time. He could feel her side pressed against the sweater that was stuck to his muscles thanks to the humidity.

"I'd like to know your name, though. If you-"

"Kuchiki Rukia. That's my name."

She put her hands in, a few inches away from his. She'd taken her gloves off, and he could see how pale they were. She stretched out her fingers as far as they would go, and they shook a little. Her knuckles were red. She put her face to her hands in the box and blew.

Her breath looked like coffee steam frozen in the air. Her nose was red like an apple too.

"You seem like you've done this before; does it help pass time?"

"How much time do you need to pass?"

"How long is this place open?"

She wouldn't look at him after she said this. She didn't move, either.

"It's warmer in this box than out here. Thanks for showing me. My hands feel better."

"Kurosaki Ichigo, that's my name."

He waited for her to look up.

"That's a dumb name. Not as cool as my mine, not even close I'm afraid."

He picked out the ice cream for his family, and removed his hands from the box. They felt warm.

"I guess I'm off then. I hope I'll see you around Kuchiki Rukia."

"Yea, me too, Kurosaki Ichigo."

He turned around to go buy his sweets and go home.

"Hey, I'm sorry to ask you this, but, if you see a really tall guy with kenseikan in his hair, would you tell him his sister is waiting for him?"

When he looked back, she was smiling. He stared for a while. He didn't feel sorry for her in the slightest.

"Yea, sorry, I know it's rude of me, so don't worry –"

"You're pretty selfish, you know. I can't let you spend all day with your hands in there for free."

"Hey! I'm going to pay him!"

"I'll wait with you until it closes. Lucky for you, I finished my lit. paper earlier today, so I'm free."

"Do I get paid to babysit you?"

"Yea, anything you want, honorable Kuchiki."

"I'd like a cup of coffee."


	2. Parade

**Parade.**

Rukia's neck itched under the heat of her scarf, and she felt little streams of sweat slide down the groves of her neck into the dip of her button up shirt.

Her shirt was under a heavy jacket and sweater. All children must return home, as must all sweat.

She felt little raw stripes on her neck whenever she adjusted the wool of her scarf, the kind she got whenever she wore jeans too tight.

Her neck was drenched, courtesy the sweat that ran down her cheeks, and patched red from the heat. She was probably having some kind of episode in the minds of the other customers at the college bookstore she was at. She had to scratch her neck though; the itch was just too much.

She remembered being a kid, attending her first wedding with her brother. She baked in the sun that day, and her neck turned pink and then red in the same way it was doing now. She wasn't stuffy that day, she was being cooked alive. She hadn't scratched then, though.

She was much happier that day.

Standing under the wind jets of the ceiling fan above, she thought about what kind of gift one usually gets for a third date. Does the third date require a gift?

Probably not.

But this was a brew of several events Rukia was trying to digest. It was her third date with a particularly tall boy who had an awkward sense of style, as well as his last day of school before a week long break, which was beginning today with a trip to the beach. She also owed the boy quite a bit for all those cups of coffee he'd bought her on their first date.

She didn't owe him much monetarily, but the warmth of those cups on that blizzard of a day was still making her sweat weeks later.

She pushed the front strand of her hair up, and into the eye of the burning storm atop her head: her beanie.

She felt a little drop of sweat slide down her forehead and onto her eyebrow. That felt nice, like the remains of a spray bottle. She still wanted to take the beanie off, though.

Perhaps she could buy him a nice beanie? The bookstore had some supplies for the everyday day of college students.

She found that there were none. The isles were stocked with floppy sun hats and sun screen for beach season. The picture of the bottle was a green arrow pointed to the back of a pink neck.

She opened the bottle and put some on her neck, feeling an ice cube-like cream spread across her skin under the back of her scarf. It smelled like chlorine. She put the cream in the basket she'd picked up when she walked in.

She gave up on the beanie idea. _I like making fun of his orange hair anyway._

She wondered if people at school made fun of his hair. It was a pretty big campus, so it had to have happened a few times. He looked pretty scrawny, too, so he probably didn't say much.

She didn't know how to feel about that. She had private lessons at home, so who was she to judge kids who got to enjoy actual college life.

He didn't really seem like the type of guy to read a lot of books either, and she laughed to cover the fact that she was in a bookstore. That part made her feel dreadfully inadequate in the squish of her gut.

She felt empty, but not hungry.

The tights on her legs let her body breath, though it was a strained breathing. Pores tried to rip apart the tights at the seam for the chance to suck in the polluted college air. She could smell cigarettes from an "employees only" door nearby.

She bent down, and eventually gave into sitting, when she got to the art supplies section. On their second date, he'd met her at a park bench, planning to go to the movies. They'd sat and talked for a few hours instead. He had a sketchpad with him that day, the leather on the front cover worn out like the back seat of her brother's teenage years car. He kept the leather in that car perfect, except for one patch of discolored hide in the back. When she laid her head down on that patch, she could feel the warm hum of the car on her cheek.

His car was pristine while working as a detective.

She rubbed her hands across the oiled leather of a sketchpad off the shelf, and remembered her date staring at her.

He said he'd been drawing the bench just next her, so she leaned back while he drew. She remembered not being able to look at him.

She put the sketchpad back. _He doesn't deserve something so nice anyway. _

Her lips stuck together now, little chips breaking apart. Hey body felt like a sweating drink, but her lips were withering away. She took out her chapstick and caked on as much as she could manage.

If her lips had to look like thin biscuits flaking apart, maybe she could make them taste like strawberry. People had to like strawberries.

She grew frustrated the more she walked around the store, and every part of her skin seemed to itch. She felt less like she had a body and more like she was in possession of a frame, made entirely of the itch.

Her fingers nearly stuck to her back when she lifted up her shirt to scratch. If she left them there too long, they'd stick like honey cough drops to the roof of her mouth.

She came up to a big rack of clothes, with unsorted male and female shirts of various sizes. It was the clearance rack for school shirts.

She slipped her gloves on to avoid ruining any of the shirts, and her fingertips dissolved into oceans of sweat crammed into a tight vessel that surfed along the faded shirts. She found a particularly long one, too long for even him.

She laughed and threw it into the basket. She had one more thing to get.

When she finished paying, she texted him that she was inside the student bookstore, waiting, because she didn't want to stand in the heat outside.

He came into her vision far faster than she expected.

"Oi Rukia, why are you in waiting in the bookstore?" he said.

"Eh Ichigo, you expected me to freeze for you? No, it's much warmer in here, thank you," she said, feeling the sweat from her back invade her tights.

He smiled, his face tilting above the "Rock-off" t-shirt he had on, black skinny jeans and white sneakers. He had twin belts that hung over the zipper of his jeans, as well as a bag that hung across his shoulder like a snake. His sketchpad was probably in that bag.

She wondered what that park bench looked like to him.

"Hey, what'd you buy here? Anything cool?" he said, pointing at the bag in her right hand.

"What's it to you? Does the perv want to know what kinds of things a lady buys?"  
>"Shut up, we're at a college bookstore," he said. His face was red, just like hers.<p>

She grabbed the sun screen out of her bag.

"I imagine you get burned pretty easily. You don't seem like the prepared kind of guy."

"I've got sun screen in the car, eh, dummy," he said.

She was a little embarrassed.

"I kind of want to buy a shirt while I'm here, though. You know I don't have any shirts at all from this school?" he said.

When she was behind him as they were heading to the clothing isles, she saw a big mass of sweat, clinging for life to both shirt and body.

"You know, I've had my eye on a shirt for a while, though," he said.

Her feet felt cramped in her boots, laces tightening around each one of the toes. They couldn't breathe.

She bumped into him at the clearance rack. Her breathing melted the insides of her mouth.

"Ya, I'm not sure I can afford a full price one, but I found one on the clearance rack I like a lot," he said.

She must not have seen it.

"It's even a size too big for me, which is good for the beach," he said.

"Hey, Ichigo, remembered when you bought me all that coffee?"

"Yea, uh, it wasn't that long ago. Why?" he said.

"Do I owe you for that?"

He grabbed her scarf, his fingertips grazing over the sweat on her neck, scratching the itch. She felt good for a few seconds.

"Damn right you do! I expect you to pay for my train ticket today! Hehe," he said.

His smile was crooked. She wanted to fix it with a sharpie. He'd look nice with a mustache. She felt a punch break through her stomach.

"In your dreams, Ichigo, I'm paying you back right now!"

She felt his eyes on her as his hand let go of the scarf. She pulled out the shirt she bought him.

"I owe you nothing, Ichigo. Here's your stupid shirt, now let's go."

She hit him straight in the face with it.

When he got back from the bathroom, she laughed at the "Dropout" logo that ran down the left side of the shirt. T

"They sold out of these in a week. Pretty cool huh? I owe you."

"Really fucking stupid, if you ask me Ichigo. Now let's go. I want to get this beach thing over with."

It felt quite like winter outside.

The metal bar under her seat felt warm on Rukia's calves on the train ride back from the beach. She bit into her scarf, and breathed cold air through the slits of her front teeth. She wondered if she could get it to freeze.

She wrapped the arches of her feet around the bar, sticking her knees up. Her boots sat on the ground beside her feet, wet from the ocean.

Ichigo was asleep, leaning the other way, on a rather hard beam that connected the roof to the floor of the train. She wanted the train to jolt.

She pushed the last strand of her hair up into the warmth of her beanie, because hair tips felt like pricks on the red of her nose when it was cold.

She bit her lip when the train did jolt, and Ichigo didn't seem to move at all. She tasted strawberry though. She liked strawberry a lot.

Without many people onboard, she decided to take a nap herself. It'd be a while before they had to get off. She laid her head against the window behind her, and tucked her feet underneath her body. Beneath her jacket, sweater, and button up shirt she felt the warm grip of something like a wool blanket.

_What a wonderful bookstore_.

Biting into her scarf and closing her eyes, she imagined what the "Dropout" logo looked liked running down the left side of her body, the same as his.


	3. Strawberry Gone

**Strawberry Gone. **

The fibers from the blanket stuck to his lips tasted like orange flavored ice cream. The frayed ends of the wool in his right hand felt soft like his little sister's hair after she got it cut.

The floor of Ichigo's dorm room was not a comfortable place, unless he laid on a blanket.

His alarm finally went off. He was tired of being comfortable.

His walk to class was a rather long one, so every day he set an alarm for about thirty minutes before class started. The usual practice let him walk around the backside of campus and buy a cup of coffee from the campus store.

The floor of that very campus store was now wood with a fire streak of dark brown sitting under polish that looked quite like glass. He thought about an aquarium full of just that, fire, and the tips of his fingers up against warm glass. He felt sweat fall from eyes that watched brilliant flames dances like fish against a current.

He wanted to feel the bite of a popsicle in the roots of his teeth, but the pockets of wool in his jacket didn't have a temperature at all.

"Kurosaki Kun! How are you today?"

Inoue held a cup of coffee out in her hand, prepared especially for him. She expected him every day at exactly 4:45 PM.

She never charged him.

"Thanks Inoue. How are you?" he said.

The warmth from the coffee sweated out of the cup and into the pores of his fingertips. The warmth flooded the back of his mouth like someone was breathing into him, and his lips felt wet.

He fumbled for change in the pockets of his jeans. Winter weather made the cold metal in coins feel like hotel machine ice cubes.

"Kurosaki Kun? Are you okay?" she asked.

The curve of her lower lip was calming. Whenever she was concerned, it puffed out just a little. It was cute.

"Yea, I'm fine. Sorry, I guess I'm just not awake. No coffee yet."

"OH yes I know! I don't drink coffee to keep awake on the job, I always move around. Sometimes I knock stuff over just to stay awake. I can't fall asleep on the job, you know." She said. Her lips were normal again, but her eyes were like undiscovered planets in the sky. They made him happy that someone was living with that much excitement.

"Yea, I think you'll be okay, Inoue. Anyway, I guess I'll see you later."

He left the coins from his hand on the counter and turned away. Off to class.

"Kurosaki Kun! Wait, don't worry about it!" she yelled.

He wondered how cold the floor was under his feet when he heard her shoes click on the floor. He needed to know if sleeping on a wood floor would keep him from sweating at night. The burning in his chest under his jacket made him hope so.

He felt a familiar cold in the palm of his free hand and the warmth of slender fingers on his knuckles.

"I already paid for the coffee, Kurosaki Kun. Consider it a gift." she said.

He felt the warmth of her breath and a wet tickle from her lower lip when she pulled him down to her level.

"I'm sorry for leaving my blanket in your room. I'll be back to get it whenever you want." He could feel the remorse in the damp skin on her cheek.

"I'll bring it over to your place whenever you ask," he said.

"No you really don't have to –"

He gave her a hug, because heat coming up in his throat from his stomach made it hard to breathe. The warmth of her face in his jacket made his chest burn even more. His shirt was damp.

He didn't know what to else to say.

When he let go, he left the change in her hand and followed the heat of the fire under his feet all the way out the door.

He found a bench on a pathway buried in snow while on his way to class, and decided sitting outside would be a better use of his time. He tried to imagine the heat of the person next to him in class, and all the steam from their tea and coffee on the back of his neck.

The bench was made from plastic little blue rings, packed with snow in the middle of winter. The bench steamed through his jeans and into his thighs like a pot of boiling water. He wondered how red his cheeks and neck were.

When he felt the stitches on his beanie, the right of his face felt the cold embrace of a metal pole on a train ride he'd once taken. He remembered reaching out in the icy air that the girl next to him breathed out and the crystals on his knuckles when he pulled his hand back.

Fresh strawberries flooded his nose, like the inside of her scarf.

The phone inside his pocket vibrated. Opening it up was like sliding open the doors to an icebox full of ice cream outside his favorite café back home, the cold air on his knuckles like the icy breath of the girl next to him on the train against his check, or the soft dampness against the skin of his chin when he pressed the inside of her scarf.

He hadn't opened that icebox in a while. He wondered if it was still there.

**A/N: I wrote this to the song, "Heartache," by One Ok Rock (Yes, I know, the angst). But, they're seriously great, and the song is emotional, given the context of why it was made. Give it a listen.**


	4. In-between Times

In-Between Times

The seat cushion against his back felt like paper dipped in hot black tea, steamy through the back of his jacket, and stuck.

He wondered how long that paper had been dipped in tea, withering from heat in a Karakura winter.

He had black and red headphones that covered his ears, keeping the cool in, under the gray knit of a beanie. Perhaps if he sweated enough on the outside, his heart would breathe in beats of frosty air again.

The girl in front of him, just a table away, made his eyes stick like pasty hands to hospital glass. His pupils like finger tips glossed, unable to look elsewhere, into the curves of Inoue's eyes, the puff of her lower lip.

She didn't seem to be able to look at him at all.

Her chipped red nails shivered apart, unprotected by the warmth of her jacket. Her neck was checkered red, the bite of winter air that leaked inside the store. He wanted someone to offer her their jacket, and their red and black head phones under a knit beanie.

He wanted her to be warm.

Those desires were halted in their fetal stage by the scratching of a chair against the wood floor under his table. He felt sparks on his tongue, and winter hands pull him away from the hospital glass.

The space, from when she walked by, had been planted with strawberry seeds, blooming in student store air only after she sat down. The black of her hair and the light pink of her lips were strawberries covered in snow from home.

"Oi, Ichigo, it's been a while, eh?" she said.

"Not long enough, Rukia. You still smell bad."

"Have I ever told you you'd look better with a mustache?" she asked.

The dip in his upper lip was drenched. Hers looked a little chapped.

_Chappy_.

"I shaved it just for today."

Her scarf was new, checked with red and white squares, fraying on the ends in tied up string. It covered her chin well. His scarf wasn't long enough to cover the chin.

"Oi, why is that I have to ask you to meet me, huh?! We're supposed to be friends, stupid Ichigo," she said.

"I didn't think you wanted to talk,"

"Well that's never stopped you before," she said.

He felt the tension in the curve of her smirk; she was trying to smile the problem away.

"Rukia, I think we need to talk-"

"Here, have some candy!" she said. He felt rough plastic in his mouth click open, and a little Chappy candy figure hit his throat.

The powder tasted green, like the ones she used to eat out of a rather large bowl while he read for his classes.

He coughed.

"Eh, what the hell Rukia? I'm trying to have a conversation here!"

"I'm the one who texted you, remember? I don't want to have a conversation," she said.

"That makes no sense."

"I don't have to make sense," she said. She leaned back in her chair, with her polished black boots on the table.

Her knees were knobby, sticking out like wooden shapes in a children's geometric game through her brown tights. He thought about her falling over, and how funny that would be.

"Do you remember when we met for the first time, Ichigo?" she asked. She was still tilted back in her chair, the ice of her breath covered by the wraps of her scarf. When he couldn't see her mouth move, he felt her voice on the cusp of his ear.

_Don't stop talking._

He couldn't answer her.

"Do you remember the icebox?" she asked.

Her seat moved against the wood under the table. The sound scratched his eyes, blurring the polished black of their table. Swirls of coffee sweat stains from the week blended together.

The skin he felt when she touched his forehead with hers wasn't like the knobs in her knees at all; he remembered feeling the same when he turned on the cold shower in the morning. His eyes jolted open, and he felt frigid air freeze through the layers of jackets he had on. Her breath made his neck sweat, the crystals he recalled turned into waves of summer air.

"I remember that icebox, Ichigo. That's all I know how to say," she whispered.

He felt smooth polish dig into his cheeks; the little black marks left from her fingertips.

"It doesn't make you feel tired, all of that thinking you do, Ichigo?" she asked.

"Not tired enough, I guess."

He felt her breath pass over his face when she let go of him. Sighs were breaks of time he couldn't read. They were in between twisting the faucet and getting into the shower.


	5. Rubber Pant Pockets

**Rubber Pant Pockets**

Kuchiki Rukia felt a press into the bare skin on her white shoulders, narrow angles heating under the beating of the heart of the sun. The top of her head heated like a microwave under black hair that seduced the incoming waves of the burning star into submission. Her toes sometimes slipped over the edge of her sandals, touching the warm cement, baking and caking each under-toe with dirt.

There was a breeze that blew in from North Karakura town, pushing the heat out of the pores of her skin and into the closed tea shops around them. Karakura spring was a melting pot of the, "coffee steam rising out of asphalt," summer days and the, "biting winds that chapped lips," winter days.

The back of her neck was cool, an extra layer of protection in the form of a rather slender forearm wrapped around it. She could feel his skin just like she could feel her own, the muscle in his arm an advanced relay between the movement of her left calf, and his right.

They walked in sequence, fierce in the face of their mundane white summer dress that fitted Rukia just right and black pants that some less confident men would say fitted Ichigo too tight.

She wondered too, in between the worlds of the baking sun and snapping wind, how Ichigo kept his skin cool, still like water drops hanging on the end of a leaf-pointed tree branch. There was a mix of cohesion and adhesion in the black "Harbinger 86" shirt that sat on top of pants like depressed elevator cables, pulling at white-top flats.

She put her hand on his lower back, her fingertips painted white searching for lighter black pockets of sweat. The muscles in his back breathed under the gentle press of each finger.

But they never perspired.

His arm rested, neither twitching from an itch nor shifting to her hip. It annoyed her, for her fingertips to work against back muscles basking in homeostasis while the feathers on his hands hung, confident that they didn't need to take to the sky.

Rukia broke stride, toes warming without care on cement blocks, pacing in front of Ichigo.

_Something to show me. Some place we've never been before._

"Oi, Ichigo, where exactly are we going?" she asked.

"It's just a little while ahead, don't be impatient Kuchiki," he replied.

"OI, you're the one who brought me out in this hot ass sun, so hurry it up slacker!"

He moved slower than she thought he would, the sound of his flats hitting the ground more like the slow death of aftershocks than an actual earthquake.

"OI!" she yelled.

"Well you've got legs, it's two crosswalks ahead," he said.

She watched white skin on his face ripen, pink patches connecting until she couldn't keep her laughter in anymore. She turned and ran before he could catch up to her.

Sandals in hand, her feet puttered against the ground, much like a smoking rudder. She quite enjoyed listening to that sound, even with cement heat cleansing the soles of her feet.

There was a familiar smell that clung to the tip of her nose, wafting inside her brain. She shivered in the ashes of a Karakura summer that now seemed like all the others. The wet bite of her scarf, the aggravating strand of hair that hung over her face and the frozen leather tundra on the inside of her gloves; all of it floated back to her mind.

She didn't really care why she remembered those things. Spring was here.

The weight of her arms swung them like clock hands when she stopped in front of an alley, cold air ringing its cold breath out and into her.

Her feet cooled on the damp cement under her, the hard mixture of the street sidewalks now mossy, brittle bricks.

Her breath crystalized, ornaments hanging in the frosty air.

"You know, I wondered why it was I couldn't remember this place," he said.

When she turned her head away from the dimmed ice box in front of her, she saw the glow of his smile, heating up the space around them like a freshly screwed-in light bulb. His shoulders were lax, and his hands stuffed rather crudely into rubber jean pockets.

She imagined the tight spaces between those fingers.

"I thought you said we were going someplace new, dumb ass. We met here," she said.

"I think, well, I don't think we're supposed to remember it as it was," he said.

"You're sounding worse by the minute. Did your dad give you this idea?" she asked.

His eyes didn't move from the box, mixtures of sadness and relief covering his eyeballs like pupils.

He read like acceptance.

"This icebox changes every time I come, did you know that?" he asked.

She didn't really know what to say, the pink of her lips sticking together like gum.

"I used to think that it was like another world, trapped and never ending. The cold inside this box was different than any AC unit or bottle of beer. It was mind numbing," he said.

"It's still cold inside that box, Ichigo," she said.

"It was really hot the day we met here," he said.

"I remember it being frozen outside," she replied.

It was then that she recalled the heat of the icebox, the warmth that consumed her purple fingertips. She felt it pass up her dress, to the nape of her neck, just like it climbed her jacket and into her scarf when they'd been there the first time.

The light above the glass doors died, snapping her glossed eyes back into reality.

"Looks like it'll be out until summer, eh Rukia?" he said.

She slipped her sandals back on her feet, feeling the heated cement outside of the alleyway grate against her teeth.

"We came to a broken down icebox, Ichigo. I have a feeling your future wife is in for a shitty ride," she said.

"She'll probably be just as shitty as me, eh," he said.

Their hands sweated, interlocking digits in black rubber pant pockets.

**A/N: This will be the last one-shot for, "Coffee." I hope you enjoyed the series. **


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